Interestingly, those sloppy rationales are almost always moral rationales at their root. In fact, the low in agreeableness and openness, average IQ or lower types that seem to populate places like immigration or the rank and file military (or the presidency it seems, really the executive branch in general) seem to always have a moral rationale for what they are doing, and are vindicated by the fact that they are the saviors of the universe because they are following their personal morality better than anyone else on the planet, which is obviously pretty bizarre to everyone who doesn't think like that.

ECHOMAN, it definitely seems like a trend that is built in that people who are willing to and good at rigging things in their favor will do so, and often not even acknowledge that they are doing that out of anything but a moral concern for all where they are just doing what needs to be done. This is generally accompanied with visions of someday kneeling before Jesus in your crusader tunic and being patted on the head for being a faithful warrior in Christ.

This is a phone post so it's not going to be as detailed as I wanted, but whatever. Let's talk about why we put poor leaders in charge.

I believe our poor leadership selection is cultural, rather than some innate flaw of human psychology. Specifically, I believe it is something we could eliminate if we had sufficient impetus. More specifically, what we have today is a millennia long trend recently tainted by democratic capitalism (yes, capitalism is partly to blame here, in case you haven't noticed our theme). However, as a long running factor in our culture, it is an especially difficult trend to reverse.

It starts with human evolution. Game theory says it is almost always better to lie; for example, if you tell others where you found food, you could have help gathering even more of it, but if you lie about where you got food, you have less risk of someone stealing all of it. All social animals lie, but humans do it surprisingly little. Beyond that, humans are naturally terrible liars: our instinctive body language is a dead giveaway, even to untrained observers. The net result is that humans evolved borderline irrational trust and trustworthiness. Nobody knows why it happened, but it did, and it's a good thing too because language is impossible otherwise.

Trust is fundamental to the way we select leaders. People naturally look to competent kin for leadership, often in a domain specific way. For example, if a group of people are hunting, the person they collectively consider the best hunter will be the leader, or the best artist when it is time to create art, etc. This is an entirely automatic, instinctive mode of self organization within a group of people. The challenge for them is that it's not always obvious to everyone who is the best, so we must rely upon specious metrics like obvious success and the body language we call confidence (a person with the most developed skills do not always express the amost confidence, or attain the greatest success). Generally these metrics work perfectly fine, but they do fall down in an especially stupid way: what I call the "Bull**** Priest".

A bull**** priest is a person who did something random, then takes credit for a totally uncorrelated result. They are full of ****, basically. But they also believe their own bull****, so they're confident about it. This is where trust fails.

You and me - we're not great at controlling the weather, but that shaman did a little dance, and then it started raining, and then he confidently explained how his dance appeased the rain gods. Clearly this guy knows what he's doing. We should obey his leadership in all matters concerning the weather and the rain gods.

This is real frickin dumb, but it's exactly how it happens.

Note, I'm not just talking about religion here. There are Bull**** Priests everywhere in our society, whenever success is sufficiently random. Finance, economic engineering, business, PUA - all Bull**** Priesthoods, stacked full of gamblers self-assured only by their survivor bias. And, as inexpert observers, we instinctively allocate far too much respect to these kinds of people given how much of their success comes from luck.

I'm getting ahead of myself, though. Let's get back to the dawn of time.

Like I hinted before, this trust heuristic - the one that gives rise to the Bull**** Priest - is actually a very good choice. It's hard to do better, and the down side isn't really that bad. A Bull**** Priest will run out of luck eventually, at which point he will be revealed as a fraud, and will lose his leadership role. In the meantime, though, a little bit of dancing never hurt anybody.

Here's the second problem: culture. Our (western) culture is strongly caste based. It's hard to see because we really don't like talking about it, and the lines have gotten a bit squiggly over the millennia, but it's there. At least as early as the Proto-Indo-European culture, and possibly much earlier, our people have been segregated into sacral, martial, and economic castes (the trifunctional hypothesis, broadly considered by experts - and this post - to be an artifact, and not a formal organizational method). In other words, people who do work, people who protect the workers, and people who are full of ****. Culture is a boon for the Bull**** Priest, because it gives them legitimacy beyond their (in-) ability to deliver. If a Bull**** Priest without cultural support does a rain dance, and it doesn't rain, the people might conclude that rain dances don't work. But with the support of culture, a failed rain dance may mean the people are impious, or at worst it means they need a more skilled rain dancer. Either way, the position of the Bull**** Priest - who, remember, is not actually doing anything of value for anyone - remains secure.

Capitalism is another way that culture preserves the station of the Bull**** Priest. For example, stock market speculators: inevitably at least some of them, regardless of any real competence, will achieve great fortune. That single random success guarantees a superior quality of life, which can be sustained at less risk, and access to lucrative opportunities that are denied to poorer (non-certified) investors. This random stoke of luck, thanks to capitalism, has turned an unexceptional gambler into a permanent fixture within his industry.

In the early PIE days, the Bull**** Priest caste was shamanic, and later became the literal Catholic Church. Today, the church has almost no power, but their caste is not gone - instead, that role is now occupied by a very different group of people (finance, in case you haven't already guessed).

The last problem I'll talk about is representative democracy, because it - along with the other factors, above - massively amplify the problem with the trust heuristic. Campaigning in a representative democracy requires a massive investment of time and money. Working people, regardless of their wealth, do not have the luxury of time or other means to seek office. Realistically speaking, it falls upon the Bull**** Priests to either seek office, or otherwise to choose the candidates via campaign donations. That doesn't mean the people want to vote for Bull**** Priests - on the contrary, most voters look at the candidates who are running, and instinctively know they are full of ****, but our culture ensures those are the only people whose names show up on the ballot.

And that's how we keep picking terrible leaders.

What can we do to fix this? Here are some ideas:

- Make it easier for normal people to run for political office, without having to be full of **** first. (GMI or similar.)

- Eliminate the cultural safety nets that are protecting the randomly successful from their inevitable failure. (Bail-outs, subsidies, granted monopolies, etc.)

- Improve general, social science, and physical science education. Fund presitigious scientific research institutions. Fund science advocacy/outreach programs. (An educated public is better at spotting people who are full of ****.)

- Pay attention to who most strongly opposes measures like the above. Those are the Bull**** Priests. You know what to do.

Yeah things being run ****ty is probably not part of the basic ontology of the universe, despite what the average person will tell you, except as a variable that can happen, but there is a lot of social momentum (and other kinds also) behind what we are doing now and I'm not convinced we have the time to make changes in the direction you mention or anything else substantially different, though as you said, with sufficient impetus, probably in the form of the usual four horsemen, some crazy **** could happen. I doubt it though, or as one of the archetypal Bull**** Priests put to paper: "Yea! deem not of change: ye shall be as ye are, & not other. Therefore the kings of the earth shall be Kings for ever: the slaves shall serve. There is none that shall be cast down or lifted up: all is ever as it was. Yet there are masked ones my servants: it may be that yonder beggar is a King. A King may choose his garment as he will: there is no certain test: but a beggar cannot hide his poverty."

Also I don't want to change the system because I'm definitely just a temporarily embarrassed Bull**** Priest so...

I very much like the direction this thread just took.

Thanks Jon`C for taking the time to write that post.

Yeah that was pretty solid.

Bitcoin?

I don't own any Bitcoin and want nothing to do with it, but I was referring to my taste for mysticism and narratives. Also those are my only really well developed skills, which isn't useful at all.

Oh. I thought you meant that you were planning to make it as a modern priest (finance).

I didn't know you wanted to be an actual shaman. Maybe screenwriting?

Also, didn't you post a bunch of bitcoin stuff earlier in this thread?

To be fair I do own a bunch of other crypto (Ether, Golem, Digix etc.) so I sort of am, but my participation in this market isn't reflective of some sort of financial prowess, I am fully aware.

I am trying to figure out how to do indie cartoons to the quality level I want to do them. I'm going to solve all these problems we are talking about with cartoons, or at least make fun of them so that someone else gets fed up and does it. I was really into live action filmmaking for a long time but it's too resource heavy (driving people to sets multiple days to get the same lighting and stuff) and you can't do as extreme abstract stuff as you can with animation. I hope to build houses out of dirt to support these technoshamanic efforts, since counting on that crypto to make me rich is a stupid plan to not have a back up for.

Well I posted that I spent some time looking into decentralized government and then Jon jumped in with a random explanation of how blockchains are fads (obviously, because industrialized civilization is a fad) and then we talked about some stuff he hadn't seen yet. But yeah.

I am pondering a bit just where it is that the artist might be said to fall among that triad of castes. I would be tempted to classify them as an introverted counterpart to the bull**** priest. We suffer from similar confirmation bias, but the non-sense we dream up more or less gets trapped within the confines of our own skulls, since we tend to

1. spend enough time thinking about our crazy ideas that it isn't often that we can be found spreading them, and
2. being introverts, we don't feel an overriding need to.

My other theory here is that boredom and technology (hello economics!) has allowed the the more paranoid fringe of said introverts to snuggle up to their bull**** priest of choice, since the web now allows them to

1. confirm their bias toward their favored bull**** priest, by interacting with people who appear to be novel variations of themselves
2. do so anonymously and telegraphically, without ever upsetting the preferred social patterns of an introvert

And boom! Just from 4chan, bull**** priests have an entirely new audience with highly virulent capacity, which had been entirely dormant before boredom and technology unleashed them from the confines of their own heads.

In my taxonomy, artists would be in the economic caste because their product is correlated with deliberate action. There's a difference between creating a work of fiction and living it.

That makes sense. I definitely want to distinguish between having crazy ideas, and taking them seriously enough to become a successful charlatan.

But I would say that 2016 (and the years leading up to it) presents us with clear evidence that technology is further inculcating the role of the bull**** priest into our culture.

I mean, unless something really big happens in 2017 to provoke a mass reaction to this trend, which I guess is what we are really all waiting for in this thread....

Further inculcating? Really? I thought they did a pretty damn fine job of that in the low tech Middle Ages. But to be fair, I wasn't alive then. I suppose they could have had Twitter back then too.


I don't think the problem is that the sacral caste has more influence than before, because they don't. I think the problem is that they aren't casting magical spells to expel demons and other bull**** anymore. Now they're casting magical spells to lower inflation.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/trumps-protective-republican-wall-in-congress-cracks.html

i think it might be starting to happen!

I think this is pretty accurate. I am definitely an introvert, though I am comfortable enough with people in many situations (if you subtract my recently acquired anxiety) but I have a huge fascination with cult leader types, as we clearly have similar thought processes, but I can't imagine having the energy to put up a consistent projection of my imagination when dealing with that many people. I would like to, I would like very much to be able to permanently project my ideas and dreams into the world, but it seems that I'm going to need money for that to replace what some people have in naturally occurring snake oil.

That said, if this blockchain stuff pans out and I get a better distribution system than ****ing youtube and **** my intent is to make art with the purpose of restructuring social narratives to what I think they should be. Probably not going to happen, but it's the same bull**** priest stuff in it's motivation, successful or not, I think. Hence my placing myself as a frustrated or temporarily embarrassed bul**** priest.

Oh, on that timescale your rebuttal blows my idea out of the water. And even today people who use technology are more independent than ever from relying on the received wisdom handed down from the sacral class (well, with the caveat that the second paragraph of your post makes them harder to detect, but I feel that at least the left is using the web to expose their disguise).

The phenomenon of poorly adjusted introverts congregating online to latch onto conspiracies and meme Trump to the oval office (or so they think) is a more of a recent blip that I've observed in my lifetime. Before, they had to subscribe to the Ron Paul newsletter, or tune into shortwave radio, and usually weren't amassing onto a powerful voting bloc (or were they? Racism seems to have unified them pretty well in the past).

But maybe they are marginal after all? Significant blows to the economic system that made them bored, angry, and paranoid could remove their need to congregate, or their political lifeblood could implode on itself any month now. I don't see Breitbart living on too long if Trump is forced to resign.

I might not have made my point clear enough.

Democrats, Trumpers, - those are the people saying "we need a better rain dancer".

Libertarians (edit: and socialists) are among those saying "rain dances don't work, idiot, stop doing them".

Whether 14 year old 4channers memed Trump into office or not, the choice was between two groups of people who are completely, up-to-their-neck full of ****. Different ****, but still ****.

Ah. Before you edited this bit in, I was about to ask if you thought all this focus on "fake news" and the whole running story about information silos people are building is mostly a red herring. I could argue that it amplified Trump, by saying that memes and lies are more effectively spread in online media like Twitter (medium is the message), but just the same we could blame CNN for giving Trump ridiculous amounts of coverage before he was popular. Moreover, if the candidates weren't both so ****ty, then it wouldn't be possible for me to contend that online ****posting or "paid Russian trolling" would even be a factor.

If the link that Eversor rings true in the coming weeks and months, it might turn out that all this media navel gazing about fake news and information silos turned out to have a very short-lived political life in Donald Trump and Breitbart, with the lesson being that it probably makes more sense to study trends on the timescale that Jon`C is, than to think too hard about the latest transient phenomenon, and its cottage industry of writers putting out articles on Medium and The Atlantic on how all the rules have changed.

I appreciate that you are responding here to my confusion about your argument, but I should also add that this notion is also interesting to me. In the past, libertarians haven't been a unified political force (except as another chorus to the mainstream conservative anti-tax / anti-government contingency)--especially to the extent of their "anarcho-capitalist" inclinations.

In the present, I am entirely disappointed with the degree to which they lend their tacit support to Bannon and Trump from the sidelines. They are sort of on board with the whole "let's take a wrecking ball to DC" thing.

On the other hand, to the credit of libertarians, it's good to see a Tea Partier in the Congress (who was very early on supported by Ron Paul people), Justin Amash, has come out saying that Trump might need to be impeached.

If Trump gets canned, there are going to be endless conspiracy theories about it. They'll perpetuate the alt-right delirium. That's not going anywhere. The political, economic and social conditions that spawned Trump and Trumpism are all still there.

Trump is just Sarah Palin 2.0 (and she was Pat Buchanan 2.0).

There may be. But they will go back to being a running joke among functioning members of the body politic, rather than having their man sitting on in on NSC meetings.

In the next Republican primary, the RNC is going to ask itself how the **** they mathematically allowed one crazy man divide and conquer a field of some ten identical candidates.

It's nothing new. There have always been things like conspiracy theories, tabloids and fringe newsletters, weird xeroxes and e-mail forwards. It's not obvious to me how the Facebook fake news problem is any worse than what we had before. Generally I'd expect that kind of content to be opinion confirming, not opinion formative, so maybe it doesn't matter.

At the risk of being Trumpastic, the major media corporations in the US are entirely as bad. They don't usually misrepresent fiction as fact like Facebook does, but they distort reality just as much by harping on stories that don't really matter, suppressing stories that do matter, falsely presenting settled debates as contentious, etc.. They have a profit motive to do this: just like the fake news writers, all CNN and Fox care about is clicks/impressions, and the best way to do that is to generate as much controversy as possible in places where controversy isn't politically inconvenient for them.

I don't know if you can blame the mainstream media for Trump, but you can definitely blame them for things like the global warming "controversy", because they just gotta give some dropout flat earther ****head on the Exxon payroll equal talking time against the MIT professor of geophysics they interviewed.

The government is guilty of this, too. GDP, unemployment stats? Saying the economy has recovered despite visible, widespread misery? lol. Can't imagine why people would be angry about that ****.

Well, yeah. US libertarians are a joke. They aren't anti-intervention, they're anti-establishment. Like, on paper they believe strongly that the government should never get involved in the daily lives of its people, but in practice that belief stops when the people are doing things that go against Ron Paul's religion.

An anti-interventionist opposes central banking because they don't believe governments should have that sort of control over finance.
An anti-establishmentarian opposes central banking because government debt = more taxes.

So, of course US libertarians will support pandemonium and destruction. It's what they've always really wanted.

End of the day, though? Even though they want to eliminate central banking for bad reasons, they still know that it's not doing anything important. Thus, "end the fed". Rain dances don't work, and we shouldn't do them anymore.

Well that's easy.

30% of crazy people vote for Trump.
70% / 10 = 7% of sane people randomly vote for each of the remaining ten.

FPTP is the problem.

I like the Democrat's answer to this problem, the superdelegate system.

Because obviously the problem is democracy, not the way they count votes.

Well that "solution" turned out just peachy in 2016.

Personally I think it would be better if we had a geoengineering program advanced enough that the weather is actually controlled by rain dances.

Eh, this gives the Republican Party's base more credit than it deserves. The statistic Trump likes to tout is true: he did win more votes during the primaries than any other Relublican candidate who won the nomination before him.

And as a percentage of the vote, the difference between him and the runner up was in pretty much the same ballpark as Romney vs. the 2nd place winner in 2012.

Which is to say there's an argument to be made that it wasn't a fluke. More republican voters liked him. No shenanigans.

It's not entirely fair to compare 2012 to 2016 like that (for reasons that I don't feel like typing out right now). But it's not entirely irrelevant either.

I'm not giving them credit, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt. FPTP causes strategic voting and vote splitting so you can't use a 45% popular win to say anything about what the majority actually believes about Trump. All you can say for sure is that a majority of registered Republicans preferred a non-Trump candidate.

ahahaha. Nobody ever believed this Trump-Ryan bromance anyway.

I guess you'll serve as a warning to other Republicans not to cozy up to a gangster when you already bad-mouthed him on tape.

Edit: hmm, I should have read more closely. The majority leader was the one who said it, and Ryan didn't say anything too bad. I'm disappointed....

I like how that page says Democracy Dies in Darkness at the top of a paywall.

TBQH the Post loses some credibility, in my mind, by sticking such melodrama next to their logo. That, and

1. Being owned by Bezos
2. Writing an opinion piece condemning their own source, Edward Snowden, whereas the Post
   
   1. Decided just what of Snowden's story to publish when they themselves broke the story, and
   2. Accepted a Pulitzer for doing so
   
   

The WaPo didn't have to make a nothingburger out of the 2016 house majority leader conversation with Paul Ryan. You'd think Trump and the Rep's have enough scandals without people having to fabricate some.

Yeah, I actually agree with that. I went and watched the video where a Post reporter explained the context, and it honestly did sound like he was making a joke.

I had originally read the headline wrong and assumed that Ryan was the one who had said it, and I was hoping that this would mean that Trump would get in a Twitter war with the Speaker of the House, culminating Ryan's ouster. Alas.

If anything, this gives the Trump administration something to counterattack with. Good going WaPo, hurting the nation by trying to capitalize on a click frenzy.